Dr. Alexander Mashkevich announces plan to form pro-Israel international news network. ‘It won’t be a propaganda channel, but will simply tell the truth,’ he tells Ynet during Jewish leaders conference

WASHINGTON – Dr. Alexander Mashkevich, president of the United Israel Appeal’s annual conference of Jewish leaders in Washington, has announced his plan to form a pro-Israel international news network, similar to al-Jazeera and the BBC.

This year’s conference focused on attempts to deal with the de-legitimization campaign against Israel, and was attended by some 200 Jewish community leaders and key philanthropists.

An announcement on the creation of the international news network was made at the end of the conference, with the aim of dealing with anti-Israel defamation in the media and influence public opinion.

Mashkevich, who also serves as president of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, said that the network would offer programs in English, French, Arabic and Spanish, focusing on news only.

“My intention is not to create a propaganda channel,” he told Ynet, “but simply a channel telling the truth.

“Unfortunately, in the current situation most channels simply don’t tell the truth about Israel,” he explained. “Every day that passes we lose the battle for Israel’s image. I am sure that Goldstone is a decent person, who didn’t want to damage Israel consciously and intentionally, but if everything he gets from the media every day is anti-Israel propaganda, I assume it’s hard to make the right decisions.”

“… there is a very important topic – dialog … I think that maybe the most primitive, but most effective mechanism how we can do it, we have to find a way, we have to push religious leaders to say some words, which are positive to Jews. And we have transfer, we have to deliver these words to simple people. If, let say, Pope, whoever, or Imam or I don’t know who, has to be top level religious people – they have to say good words about Jews. How we could achieve it? It is our target, our job. I will tell you later what we do in this way. But we have to do it not only in a room, we have to do it through media to deliver it to hundreds millions, so when simple people hear what the leaders are saying, believe me, they follow their leaders.”

Machkevich gives an example of this ‘dialogue’ explaining how he bought off Russian Orthodox Church leaders to such a fantastic degree that Orthodox Church representatives bestowed on him the order of Saint apostle Andrey Pervozvanny, Protector of Russia and publicly proclaimed, “God gave to you, to your people this land [“Israel”]. You have no right to give to the Palestinians even one piece of this land.”

“I will tell you an interesting story. I built myself five Orthodox churches. Five. And they are not small, they are big, big – thousands people could come to one church.”

The nice things that Mashkevich buys as part of his ‘dialogue’ with faith leaders come with strings attached, as you may have guessed. We saw one such example in Astana, Kazakhstan, July 2009 when Mashkevich and his crony, Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev hosted a “World Council of Religions ” and brought in Israeli terrorist, Shimon Peres as a surprise keynote speaker. The surprise was not a welcome one. See:

Peres [scheduled to give a] speech … before an inter-faith panel in Kazakhstan in which hundreds of Muslim leaders and religious figures from the Middle East and the world will participate. The chief rabbis of Israel and the minister of religious affairs will also be in attendance.The forum is being organized by the Kazakh government together with the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress.